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Comment by throw646577 | Hacker News Reader

"Grifter" is a terrible word choice for the "personality type" in the description.

Grifting is always a form of aberrant behaviour -- manipulative, cruel, deceitful, larcenous. Unless you are Humpty Dumpty, I don't know why you would choose a word for a quadrant that requires you to clarify that you do not mean to associate its actual meaning with the behaviours in that quadrant.

"Politician" (albeit with a small p) is a much, much better word for the personality type in the description.

Politics is only sometimes a form of aberrant behaviour.

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I agree with this wholeheartedly. I fed ChatGPT the description and they said a name without such a negative connotation was "navigator." I think this is better. It also recommended "politician" as well. I think navigator is fitting. They let the structure of the system they find themselves in determine their path. The system navigates for them.

Water vs Rock, for my Tao enthusiasts. Combined you have beautiful functional waterways upon which to leisure or work.

In this day and age, I would think "politician" would be worse than "grifter".

(Well, maybe not just this day and age ... this is a rather timeless observation.)

> I’m naming them this way because these are the names you’d give them when you’re complaining about your coworkers

Are they? Someone who actually does the work is not a grifter, by definition.

I think you'd have to work at it to be a successful grifter. If there's a sucker born every minute, then you really gotta be able to scale.

> I think you'd have to work at it to be a successful grifter.

It might take work to be get away with being a fraud, but you're not doing work that's helping anyone you're working with.

Exactly the point I am trying and evidently largely failing to get across :-) You managed it more concisely than me.

Work at grifting, yes -- but the description associated with that quadrant is someone who actually works for the goals of the organisation: this is the literal opposite of grifting.

Like, the post says "You want a grifter leading a complicated engineering project".

No, you really, really, really don't.

> No, you really, really, really don't.

You do.

Believers are too inflexible and will kill the project eventually because of it.

Coasters won’t work enough to deliver the project.

Grinders will eventually burn out and devolve into coasters, or start divert the project into unrelated territory (focusing too much on optimization, testing, accessibility).

Grifters are the only ones who can lead projects, because they understand where the wind blows.

Yeah. And I'll just add, so often the success of a project is not in its technicals, but the smoke and mirrors that are used to sell it. Be that to upper management, clients, regulators...

Right. But if you do all of that in service of the collective goals of the project, you are, by definition, not a grifter -- unless the project is itself grift.

(Which it might be, because AI)

grifting is hard work!

Given the description in the article, I'd say Cynic/Idealist instead of Grifter/Believer.

I think this is great. I've certainly had companies where I believed in the mission and others where I was just doing the work to help along the project or advance my own career experience. But I wasn't ever there to deceive people or fraudulently misrepresent myself.

I think Realist more than Cynic, maybe. Because the activities in that description are perhaps realistically transactional, not cynical.

I dunno. The whole thing is wobbly really.

Or maybe even loyalist/idealist to purge any hint of negativity from the first category

go back to the very start; the perspective is supposed to be the assholes you identify in each category where you don't see yourself. By definition it should be negative, and this should feel uncomfortable because you don't want to view yourself in the same light. The fact there's so much debate implies they nailed the labels.

> the perspective is supposed to be the assholes you identify in each category where you don't see yourself

There is literally a "Me" in the graph.

This gives me a little Zizekian vibes, where it's intentionally trying to confuse and shock in order to shift your perspective without you even realising it. I like it. The relabeling is just another form of understanding by interacting.

Does it? Loyalty is for henchmen. You only need it if you have a habit of asking people to do something slimy.

Or you have work that sometimes is unpleasant (but necessary!) and having people jump ship at the slightest provocation gets old.

I do unpleasant work all the time, I do it because I believe it's necessary. The fact that my boss also believes it is necessary is convenient. This has lead to an average job length of about 3yr (max: 7), so I don't think it's leading me to be overly flighty.

Every resignation has been a bit of a manifesto though, so it's not like everything is perfectly normal, but it works out well enough.

Could be but

> They respect the company mission as written, but what they really value is what the leaders of the company show they care about.

> Grifters aren’t very good at changing the culture of their organizations. They tend to go with the current instead.

To me loyalist fits this well, not because they are necessarily going to do dirty work, but because they are loyal to the rules that are in place.

No you're right, it's a better label.

I just am too much of a believer/anarchist to see loyalty as any better than grift. A grifter does their own evil, a loyalist does someone else's. I'm not sure which is more repugnant but I'm sure that my view on this is quite biased. I guess that makes me the target audience re:

> this article is really aimed at people who are trying to have a bit more empathy for the assholes they work with

This discussion would benefit a lot from The Banality of Evil, but I'm definitely not the best one to introduce it.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

But I think it would very much argue in favor of people being on average more like loyalists. Just regular Joes trying to get a promotion and causing untold damage in the process.

I had heard the phrase, but didn't know where it came from. Based on the wiki, I think I'm inclined to agree with the author. Do you recommend it? I could use something a bit less abstract than my typical fare...

I didn't read the book, that's above my paygrade. But a good introduction would be the episode on Philosophize This about the author

Politics in SE: Self > Team > Org (it fits grifter) The reverse fits believer: Self < Team < Org

A<B means that person considers B’s interests to be more important than A’s (in the work context here).

I would use "Visibility chaser" instead of "Grifter".

Visibility is the single most important thing during the promotion cycle thus it is the most important thing for such people. Go write a class and then pretend that you invented the wheel and promote yourself to everybody, never spent the time on anything that can't be "sold" to management even it if it useful for the team.

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